While an inmate at Botetourt Correctional Center, Thomas Jackson claimed, he was tormented repeatedly by a guard who dropped a lit cigarette down his pants pocket, smeared fly bait on his clothes, placed a hot pepper to his cut lip and left him to a herd of hungry cows.

Unusual as the allegations were, they didn't amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

A jury in U.S. District Court in Roanoke cleared the correctional officer, Michael Fletcher, Thursday in a lawsuit that had accused him of violating the inmate's constitutional rights.

"If he's a sadistic, malicious sicko, like they say, wouldn't he have been fired 20 years ago?" Fletcher's attorney, Paul Beers, said in characterizing the case as a credibility contest between a longtime, respected lawman and a convicted felon. 

Jackson claimed that he suffered most of his abuse while working on the farm crew, a team of inmates supervised by Fletcher that did shop work and cared for livestock at the Botetourt County prison, which closed in 2009.

Fletcher, now retired on disability, admitted that he once dropped a lit cigarette into the back pocket of Jackson's jeans while the inmate was working in the shop.

"Boy, that was dumb," Fletcher testified, describing the incident as a prank gone awry in a culture where inmates often engaged in horseplay. Fletcher condoned the roughhousing to a degree, he said -- but with the intent of keeping the inmates happy and productive.

"It was a little bit loose out there," he testified.

The correctional officer denied a litany of other abuses that Jackson claimed had occurred over a yearlong period.

In testimony during the two-day trial, Jackson described the nausea he felt after bait from fly traps was smeared on his clothes. He recounted the pain of cutting his lip, letting Fletcher inspect the injury and then having a habanero pepper pressed to the wound. And he related the fear he felt when Fletcher dumped some feed at his feet, then jumped into a pickup truck and locked the doors as a herd of cows approached.

Jackson's attorney. Melvin Williams, said it was all part of a sadistic pattern.

"This man's pain was this man's pleasure," Williams told the jury, pointing first to Jackson and then to Fletcher.

Jackson, now free on probation, also accused the guard of punching him repeatedly, shocking him with an unknown device, and throwing firecrackers under a truck he was working on.

In the end, the jury rejected all of the allegations after deliberating about two hours. Although there was some question about whether the statute of limitations had expired on a few of the claims, most came down to the word of the guard against the guarded.

"I liked Tom," Fletcher said from the witness stand. "For the life of me, I don't know why he's scared of me."